by Cai Emmons
She nods. Anyone alert to the news had heard about those fires. But it hadn’t occurred to her that Bronwyn was involved. Diane had no idea Bronwyn had gone to the west coast, though Bronwyn wouldn’t have told her, estranged as they’ve been.
“So this actress Lyndon Roos—she was in those vampire movies—”
Diane shrugs. “Sorry, I’m not a moviegoer.”
“Well, she was saying on Twitter that some woman had walked by her house in Topanga Canyon saying she was on her way to put out the fire near there. I knew it had to be Bronwyn. For some reason this actress believed Bronwyn. I’m not sure why, but you know actors—they’re pretty suggestible. Whatever.”
Diane winks. “Unlike you and me.”
“I tracked down Lyndon Roos and we went looking for Bronwyn.”
“A tall order perhaps?”
“We found her collapsed in the wilderness near where the fire had been. She was really dehydrated, almost hallucinating.” He wipes his brow with the back of his hand, his suave veneer fully evaporated. She can’t believe she’s known nothing of this until now.
“Go on.”
“We got her hydrated and I took her back to my friend’s place in Venice where I was staying. She slept for a long time but as soon as she woke up she was on the move again, determined to do something about the other fire, farther east, which was still burning out of control. She wanted my help driving her to her car and renting an ATV. I was happy to help her. I mean, I had no idea what was going on at all, but I was pretty darn curious by then.
“So we ended up going up this mountain on the ATV to where we could see that other fire. Then she told me to leave her alone—basically she ordered me to get lost. But of course I couldn’t. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a huge fire like that, but it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Ferocious and loud. Horribly hot and really unpredictable. There was no way I was going to leave her there alone. So I made like I was disappearing, but I actually came back and watched her. And, okay—”
He leans forward and his eyes distend and his lowered voice seems to emerge from the end of a long pipe. “I saw her do this thing—she faced the fire and it was like she was yelling at it, but she didn’t actually make a sound. At least I don’t think she did. And I swear to god, the fire began to go out. And okay, a fire might go out for various reasons, but this one went out quickly, like in a few minutes, just like the other one had. There was no reason, no other explanation, but her . . . oh Christ, I can’t tell you how—”
He blinks quickly. His eyes are moist. “She’s, I don’t even know how to say it—” He composes himself and peers up at her. “Do you believe me?”
Diane can’t look at him. All the tissues at the back of her nose and throat are inflamed, and she feels the same terrible shock and ache she felt in her back yard after Bronwyn left in a fury. She generates a dry laugh. “Believe—that would be stretching it.”
“Maybe this will help.” He pulls his phone from his jacket pocket and fiddles with it for a moment then extends it to her. A jerky video plays on the tiny screen. A fire spreads like orange water across the mountainous landscape of rocks and trees.
Matt gets up and comes around behind her. “Wait, it’s coming up in a sec. Okay. Yeah. Look closely.” He points to the bottom of the tiny screen. “That’s her. That dot.”
Diane reaches for her reading glasses. The dot does not resemble a person exactly, though it could be.
“Okay—now,” he says.
The fire begins to reverse direction as if someone has hit a rewind button.
For four or five minutes they watch as the fire continues to retreat. Then the screen goes black. The image returns from another angle, featuring the skeletons of blackened trees encased in thick smoke. After another minute or so the video stops altogether and they stare at an icon-filled home screen.
“That’s it. Isn’t it radical?” he says. “See? Proof.” He takes his seat, smiling hopefully.
Diane does not smile. Devices—why do people trust their devices so much, investing them with magical power. “Matt, this isn’t proof. Not in my book. Hollywood is doctoring moving images every day of the week.”
“I haven’t done a thing to that, I swear.”
“I can’t even be sure that’s Bronwyn.”
“On a larger screen you can zoom in and see her clearly. I can email it to you. If only you could’ve been there. It was—” He is too overcome to continue.
“It still says nothing about what really happened there.” She pauses. “So you did come here to convince me of something.” She has to keep talking; as long as she talks she feels somewhat in charge.
He stares down at the table cloth. Their meal, she suddenly thinks, is taking a long time to come. “Maybe I did, yes,” he says.
“Okay, let’s get this straight. You think you saw Bronwyn put out a massive fire with the sheer force of her will?”
“I know it sound crazy. But that’s what I saw.”
“I’m a hard sell. Even if I did believe you—which I don’t—what would you want me to do?”
“Well, the thing is, she’s upset now because after she put out that second fire there was a terrible rain storm that she says she started and it caused a lot of flooding and a woman died. She thinks she’s responsible and that she should stop, you know, meddling. But if she really can do these things—stop storms and tornadoes and fires and bring on rain and who knows what else—shouldn’t she be out there helping the world—you know, the whole planet?”
“That’s a pretty big if.”
“You’ve known her so long—aren’t you the least bit curious?” Matt gazes across the restaurant. His youthful face appears battered. “She needs some encouragement and she admires you a lot. You have a lot of influence.”
Aren’t you curious? The same accusation Joe has been leveling. Of course she’s curious. Her whole life has been organized around her curiosity. “Look, if I had any influence over Bronwyn she’d be back in graduate school finishing her PhD. I’ve known her since she was eighteen. She’s a very independent woman.”
“Couldn’t you talk to her?”
“And tell her what?”
Tom Geronimo’s timing is unimaginably bad. He appears without warning, standing over their table with the pretense of good cheer, oblivious to what he’s interrupting. The young woman is not with him. At least he has a mote of discretion. Matt, too, is a young person, but no one ever expects a woman of Diane’s age would be committing indiscretions with young men. It’s insulting really.
“It’s been ages,” Tom says. “How’s MIT treating you?”
Oh, how he irritates her. The supercilious swerve of his hips. His compulsive habit of rolling his shoulders. “Good. All good,” she says. “How’s the history business?”
“Not bad. I’ve got a new book coming out next month. Aaron Burr.”
She nods. Figures. “I’ll look for it. This is my friend Matt Vassily. Tom Geronimo. Matt’s a journalist. Tom’s a historian.”
Matt doesn’t flinch under Tom’s assessing gaze.
“You’ve really scored with a Diane Fenwick interview. You couldn’t have a better subject. They don’t make them any more brilliant than she. Where shall I look for this?”
Matt’s face configures a question.
“What publication?” Tom clarifies.
Diane jumps in. “Leave him alone.”
“Well,” Tom says, “make sure you include all her trade secrets. Oh—you’ll have to excuse me. Let me know when that article is out.”
The young woman has resurfaced by the front door. “Insufferable,” Diane says when Tom has disappeared. “Sorry to subject you to that. He specializes, by the way, in traitors and villains. And young women. Where were we?”
“You talking to Bronwyn.”
“I’d like her to have a brain scan. To see if there are any abnormalities.”
“You want to study her? She’d hate to be studied.”
“If she’s making such claims—”
“Ask her to show you what she can do. Then you’ll see.”
The waiter sets down their plates, lidding their conversation again. The salmon is fleshy and pink and it parts easily under her fork. She has forgotten how famished she is. She revels for a moment in the escape of eating. Of course she’s curious.
“I can’t think of a single precedent for this. Or a single hypothesis that might explain it.”
“Haven’t you ever seen anything that you couldn’t explain? Something that’s just a mystery?”
What is it about him that seems to call her out and challenge her at some vulnerable core? She swallows hard. A chill spreads through her gut. The pearlescent twilight. The cobblestone street. The desperate father using every ounce of his brawn and will to rearrange fate.
“I don’t know a damn thing about science,” Matt is saying. “But I do know what I saw. And it was amazing. Truly amazing. But now Bronwyn is suffering. She has no idea what to do. Someone has to do something to help her. You know?” He sighs. He has taken only a single bite of his burger. The anorexia of love. Bronwyn is suffering, he says, but clearly he is suffering too.
His hand rests on the table beside his plate. She reaches out and touches it, then withdraws quickly before he takes the gesture as any sign of commitment.
47
They abandon their meal, half-eaten, and she walks him back to his car. The streets of Cambridge are packed with students back at the business of school, filling the sidewalks with their speed and palpable ambition, forcing Diane and Matt to walk single file. It’s fine with Diane—she’s no longer in the mood for talking, and Matt, having made his case without convincing her of anything, has withdrawn. How has she come to this—debating science fiction with people who believe it’s real.
Matt has parked on a side street off Brattle, a nearly impossible feat in this city. His car is ridiculous, the mottled black jalopy of a teenager, not a professional. “I know, I know,” he says, sensing her judgment. He pulls out a business card, crosses something off it and writes on the back. “Here’s my info. Maybe you’ll change your mind about things.”
It’s one of his old cards from the tabloid. Vassily, a Russian surname. He is nervous again, apparently eager to leave. “You know,” she says, “changing weather is a losing proposition. If someone could change the climate, now that would really be something.”
He doesn’t respond though his eyes seem to jig a little. They shake hands. Then, on a sudden impulse, and because he looks so forlorn, she pulls him in for a hug. “Tell Bronwyn I’d love to hear from her. Tell her I’m not mad, even though I still think what I’ve always thought.”
He nods and she heads away briskly because the meeting has ended and not auspiciously, and the situation has nowhere else to go. How will she represent this meeting to Joe? Joe will want to know the blow by blow, but she needs some time to sort things out before she shares it with anyone, even Joe. At the end of the block footsteps clatter up behind her and, following urban protocol, she pastes herself against the glass façade of a kitchenware store. Matt stops in front of her.
“Sorry to bother you again, but my car won’t start and I thought you might be able to recommend a garage.”
“You don’t have a Triple A card?”
“Sadly no.”
It mystifies her how so many young people manage to survive with no innate sense of self-preservation. They have cell phones but no Triple A cards. She tries to think where she and Joe have their cars serviced, but no place comes to mind immediately. Car maintenance is Joe’s purview (the result of a long discussion they had years ago about the pros and cons of sexual dimorphism). She invites Matt back to the house—Joe is there, he’ll know what to tell Matt.
Matt’s disappointment about the lunch discussion is compounded by embarrassment. He got too emotional, revealed too much about his feelings for Bronwyn, lost his dignity. Furthermore, he isn’t in the habit of interviewing people with big professional reputations like Dr. Fenwick and she, while warm, still made him feel small and unconvincing. He hated to admit that he’d worked for The Meteor. It’s not that she said anything that was directly disparaging, but she didn’t—or couldn’t—conceal her disdain. Now, seeing her house—old and stately on the outside, opulent inside—he realizes he never would have contacted her if he’d known her full story.
The husband, Joe, is there and Dr. Fenwick—Diane—is only too happy to pawn Matt off on him. She disappears upstairs, and Joe takes Matt to the kitchen where they perch on stools at a granite countertop. Joe—friendly and unpretentious, even shabby, not at all the kind of husband he would have expected Dr. Fenwick to have—gives Matt the lowdown on his options, and they make arrangements to meet a tow truck back at Matt’s car.
The two men set out walking back along the same streets Matt walked with Diane. Gusting wind brings down a confetti of dry leaves. Matt can’t tell if the commotion he feels is coming from the traffic and wind, or from his own brain.
“She’s your girlfriend?” Joe asks.
“Well—” Matt hesitates. He isn’t used to being around someone else who asks questions as freely and directly as he does. “I thought she was, for a nanosecond.”
“Forget it. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay. Are you a scientist too?”
“Heck no. I’m a novelist. And no, you’ve probably never heard of me or my books.”
Matt laughs.
“I was lying. I do mean to pry. What happened at lunch? Diane seemed upset.”
“You know about Bronwyn?”
“I don’t know her as well as Diane does, but I do know her, and Diane tells me a lot.”
“The stuff she does—you know about that?”
Joe laughs. “It’s all we talk about these days. I’m trying to get Diane to open her mind a little, exercise her curiosity.”
“Really?” Matt turns to Joe and finds an expression like a cone, wide open, ready to funnel anything. “That’s exactly what I said to her. To Bronwyn, too. She doesn’t want to use this talent of hers any more—or even think of it. She just wants to retire, or hibernate, or whatever. But I went to LA and I saw her in action. I actually saw her stopping a fire. I even filmed it. It’s on my phone. I’ll show you.”
The two men stop right there in the street and bend over Matt’s phone, bodies angled to block the light, oblivious to the traffic’s din and the fretful wind and the waiting tow truck. They are relative strangers, almost twenty years apart in age, but they recognize in each other a kindred spirit. Watching the retreating wall of orange on the tiny screen, they allow themselves to be engulfed in the mystery.
48
Diane, cadaver-stiff, lies on top of their king-size bed. The men, gone for a couple of hours, are back, and she hears them moving around the kitchen, opening and closing the refrigerator, then going out to the backyard. If she looked through the bedroom window she would no doubt see them lounging in the Adirondack chairs, beers in hand, chatting up a storm, but frankly, she’s afraid to confirm what she imagines. Matt and Joe are two of a kind, Joe the perfect audience for Matt’s preposterous tale, Joe the gullible listener, ready to be awed, dying to find a legitimate reason for believing the impossible. He has built his entire professional life around a vivid imagination, a belief in things that aren’t real. She has understood the necessity for that, and up until now it hasn’t impinged on her, but now this proclivity of his thinking seems as dangerous as that of a religious fanatic who believes in some fabricated god dispensing arbitrary dictums on how to live. If Joe has always spurned religion and maintained that the existence of any god cannot be proven, as she does, why is he so eager to jump on board with Matt and Bronwyn?
Can’t Joe and Matt see the absurdity of it all? They’re both bright, so why aren’t they skeptical? She yearns to discuss the situation with someone who thinks as she does. Once that person would have been Bronwyn, or at least she was trainin
g Bronwyn to be that person, though she knows, as all her friends with children have always told her, that you cannot control how a young person develops, or the choices she might make, even if she shares your DNA.
A charley horse seizes her calf, forcing her to sit up. She kneads the muscle and stands tentatively and, once standing, cannot resist a glimpse out the window. She was right about the beers, right about the men getting along too well. Matt is cartwheeling diagonally across the lawn and Joe, his audience, laughs and claps.
It is certainly not the first time that Diane has felt outside the camaraderie of men. The feeling has characterized much of her professional life. Men always seem to find such physical ways to bond, roughhousing, hurling or hitting balls, showing off the various achievements of their muscles. So many of her male colleagues who were skinny and geeky in high school and college have become serious runners or rock climbers or cyclists, and once they become those things they can’t resist crowing about it. She herself has always been a non-athlete; she can’t remember ever having attempted a cartwheel.
Now Joe tries. He isn’t much of an athlete either, and can’t muster the speed, his body refusing to spin in a single plane, so he thunks to the grass on his buttocks. A second attempt yields the same result, and he gives up, laughing, not easily humiliated. She supposes she should go out and join them, find out about the status of Matt’s car, offer him dinner if need be, possibly a bed for the night.
She heads downstairs, aware of the rise in humidity since this morning. A storm is forecast and its cleansing rain will be welcome. But the wind that flutters through the house is not really wind—it is the wake of a person passing through the dining room. She stops at the bottom of the stairs just as the bright flag of Bronwyn’s hair disappears through the French doors to the patio.
“Bronwyn!” She hurries to the door, heart vaulting. “Bronwyn?”
She presses her face to one of the door’s glass panes. The men are still out there, relaxing back in their chairs, assessing the swift black clouds overhead. The rest of the yard appears empty until the spray of red hair comes into view again.
